Managerless, beleaguered and obliterated by call-offs, Scotland clambered on board a charter flight to Luxembourg yesterday.

Tonight caretaker boss Billy Stark will try to make a team out of these tartan odds and ends and send them out on to a cow field of a football park which, only this weekend, was being ploughed into chunks by the local rugby side.

Stark is up against the nation ranked 144th in the world – in other words FIFA’s equivalent of the Dog and Duck – and a team made up almost entirely of part-timers from its own amateur league.

No wonder Craig Levein lined this one up. After masterminding his only meaningful wins as Scotland boss over the might of Lithuania and Liechtenstein, he must have seen this as a chance to scramble a win over yet another international giant starting with the letter ‘L’. Presumably, the next stop would have been Lapland.

So now Levein’s gone and, with most of Scotland’s ‘A’ list players preferring to turn this one down thanks very much, there is a feeling that, other than Levein, Stark is about the only man in Scotland who would touch this one with a bargepole.

Win it and so what? But lose it? The man left holding the baby would be better off catching that flight to Lapland than returning to Glasgow still expecting to be taken seriously as a candidate to land this job on a permanent basis. Well, at least they’re always taking on staff there at this time of year.

And yet, despite it all, the immensely likeable Stark gave the impression yesterday of a man whose Christmases have come all at once. He may not have asked to be promoted from the 21s – in fact he was shoved out into the firing line – but now that he is here he plans on making the most of it.

He said: “Yes I do want to enjoy it. I’ve been asked to do the job for this game and that’s what I want to do, enjoy the experience.

“I’m privileged and honoured to be in this position and I’d never underplay that or its significance. I'm working with the best players. Okay, we’ve had some lads pull out from the original squad but I've been really heartened by the way the SPL boys, and the younger ones, have taken to the training.

“They’ve not looked out of place at all, in there with the Fletchers and Naismiths. That’s promising.”

Who knows, if Stark can whip this bunch into shape and, under his watch, Scotland finally put on a performance of which the nation can feel proud and maybe even excited again, then the man at the wheel might suddenly become much more than just the caretaker.

Indeed, Stark could yet become a serious contender because there are men in high places – or on Hampden’s sixth floor to be exact – who rate him highly as a coach.

And yet here he is in Luxembourg of all places for a match which even he admits will be almost impossible to win, even if the scoreline should go in his favour. He said: “If we lose it’s a chance for more negativity and obviously we don’t want that.

“So yes, I take the point it is a bit of a hiding to nothing because this is a game everybody expects us to win. I’ve said the same to the players.

“But by the same token, you would probably say Luxembourg are a big minnow in terms of their recent results. They beat Macedonia, they drew with Northern Ireland in Belfast and Portugal only beat them 2-1 in Luxembourg. I’m not saying they struggled to win that game but it wasn’t comfortable.

“You only need to look at those results to see it’s going to be a difficult match. But that shouldn’t take away from our aim to be really positive and to try to win the game.”

And yet, as Stark and his players stepped off the team charter yesterday, it was impossible not to at least wonder what on earth we were all doing here. And if, had it been left up to Stark in the first place, would Scotland have taken on this game at all?

He said: “I probably would have although I’m not surprised by the question. I think England have got five players out or something like that, Northern Ireland are playing a World Cup qualifier and they’ve lost players too. It’s just that point in the season where injuries start to catch up on people.

“I can understand why, having been involved in club management myself, managers think a wee break will allow those players to get back to full fitness. It’s up to me to be sympathetic and to try to manage the situation as best I can.”

It was something of a surprise to see both Kris Commons and Charlie Mulgrew on the team flight yesterday, especially given Neil Lennon’s public appeal for his players to be allowed to sit this one out. This plea was ignored, most probably out of convenience, because while Celtic may well have bigger fish to fry at the moment, Stark and Scotland most certainly do not.

And so, while in an ideal world the man in charge may wish to take a look at the likes of Leigh Griffiths, Liam Kelly, Murray Davidson and Andy Shinnie in a dark blue shirt, he can’t afford to take too many risks with Scotland’s already damaged credibility.

Stark said: “In three days you could get yourself in a real fankle by trying too much too soon. There isn’t actually that much I’d have wanted to change anyway but you still have your own thoughts on how you approach a game, what you do with the players, how you talk to them and set the team out.

“There are things which would happen naturally but I didn’t want everyone to say I’d binned a lot of players and brought a lot of new ones in, thinking ‘It’s all about him.’

“Sometimes managers get too much praise and too much criticism, but for me it always comes down to players and hopefully we have players good enough to do the job.”

If not then this Scotland gig may be a harder task than any of us ever realised. A hiding to nothing? You better believe it.